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18/03/2016

☆ The A To Z Of Atari - U is For ☆ #Retrogaming #GamersUnite

ATARI, say the name out loud and immediately you are transported back to the days of maverick programmers and Nolan Bushnell’s golden years as the leader of the world’s biggest video games company.

ATARI ruled the video games world and created the video games industry almost single handed.

They produced some of the most exciting video games and had the most talented individuals working for them.

This was the late 1970’s and into the early 1980’s. Fast forward to 2016 and ATARI have almost been obliterated. There is still the ATARI name in the video games world but the quality output and the consoles have dried up to almost nothing.

We all know how this giant was humbled and cut up into pieces. The dissection of the powerhouse has been a long drawn out process over the course of 30 odd years.

It saddens me that this is the case as ATARI should be challenging the likes of NINT in the world of video games creation and console output. ATARI is the grandfather of video games as we know them and yet they sit silent in the shadows without a real voice.

From where they were and what they achieved early on to what it has become I consider ATARI to be an underachiever.

Maybe I’m being harsh BUT one thing I do know, with the clout that they had and the position they held in the video games world they should’ve evolved with the video games industry much like Nint did but alas it was not to be. ATARI fell by the wayside with a lot of also ran ideas and concepts.

The Jaguar should’ve been an all-conquering success but it was a seen as a bit of a joke when it was released.

The LYNX should have been the premier handheld but again it just wasn’t as good as the Nint offering.

It would appear that after the success of the ATARI 2600 they could never quite muster the magic ingredient for another success. They clung to the past glories of the legacy machines and maybe that was their undoing.

We all love the ATARI memories and the amazing video games and arcade machines they gave us but we all know it could have been so much more of a success for ATARI.

In the words of Nolan Bushnell,

“Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the

person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something

about it that makes a difference.”

It’s a shame that ATARI ran out of ideas (or maybe just stopped taking showers!)